


What The Doctor Learned About Love

by AndreaLyn



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-08
Updated: 2013-06-08
Packaged: 2017-12-14 08:21:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/834739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaLyn/pseuds/AndreaLyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A fortune teller told Leonard McCoy that his true love's name starts with J. One Jocelyn later, McCoy is ready to tell her how wrong she was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What The Doctor Learned About Love

  
When Leonard McCoy was twelve years old, his father and mother took him to a traveling carnival that was stopping in Atlanta for two days. He hadn’t wanted to go, citing that the circus acts were barbaric and the scene preposterous. His father had agreed, but his mother wanted him to keep an open mind about the universe.  
  
So apparently it had been a lesson in forward-thinking. Leonard had the feeling it was something close to a punishment for an act he couldn’t recall committing.   
  
His father went off to argue with one of the booth attendants about the odds of winning a game, his mother was perusing one of the stalls selling costume jewellery and Leonard McCoy, he of twelve years old and already in junior year of high school, found himself being beckoned forward by a gypsy-woman. Her long nails were painted red, her brown eyes glinted with age and wisdom.   
  
He ducked past the orange and pink glittering draperies of her tent and found himself surrounded by cards and candles and the thick pervading smell of incense that seemed determined to find its way deep into each and every one of his pores.   
  
“Leonard McCoy,” she spoke. She was young if you looked anywhere but at her eyes. Her hair was black as the darkest night and hung low down her back. Her lips were as red as blood and she had no marks of age lurking around her to indicate that she was anything more than thirty. It was just the  _eyes_. Every time he looked at her eyes, some part of his soul believed that she couldn’t be younger than seventy, absolutely couldn’t be. “Let me read you a fortune of a future.”  
  
He wasn’t sure how she knew his name, but he had been raised by science. His logical mind was busy telling him that she had simply overheard one of his mother’s stern calls of his name or caught sight of his ID badge that had allowed him entry into the carnival for the price of a child.   
  
He couldn’t say why he sat himself down and let her take hold of his palm to study the lines and the marks there as if they held a secret. There were faint scars from an active childhood and a heady curiosity in his father’s antique surgical materials, but as far as Leonard could tell, there was no future to be read there. Only the past.  
  
“I see,” she noted.  
  
Leonard didn’t.   
  
“You can’t possibly know my future based on the lines of my palm,” Leonard said with some mild disdain. He knew all about the Barnum Effect and the way she could read him with the grace and accuracy of a con artist, picking up on small habits and tendencies in order to paint a broad picture of his life.   
  
She smiled mysteriously at him, releasing his palm. “Not only can I see your future, but I can see the love of your life.”  
  
“I don’t believe you.”  
  
“You don’t have to,” she promised, unwinding the scarf that covered her hair and tying it back up again with slow care, fingers caressing the sides of her neck slowly as she pressed her palms flat against the table. “The love of your life, the one you will spend your life with has a name that begins with J. And you will love your soulmate more than anything in the world and you will be unable to leave your love, as though something stronger binds you together.”  
  
Leonard hovered for a moment, digging through his pockets for a credit chip. He didn’t believe her – except for the small sliver of him that held hope in things that couldn’t quite be explained by science – but he had no intention of walking away without being fair.  
  
“Here,” he said, placing a credit chip on the table.  
  
“For true love, my readings are free,” the gypsy-woman promised, pressing the chip back into his hand. “Go back to your parents, Leonard McCoy. And remember the letter J.”  
  
*  
  
The letter J had stolen his heart twiceover and Doctor Leonard McCoy is considering blacklisting the letter from his personal alphabet. Jocelyn had come and gone and with her had gone his other J -- his sweet and lovely Joanna, the one who had taken his heart and ran.   
  
He’s ended up on a big E with many letters, but his J’s are far, far away and as he sits with Jim Kirk in the Captain’s quarters reading another missive from Jocelyn that talks about Joanna’s latest birthday, he sighs heavily.  
  
“You believe in fate, Jim?”  
  
“Me?” Jim pokes his head out from the washroom, tying his towel around his waist. “Like, our lives are destined and all that, like Ambassador Spock keeps implying? I guess to a degree I believe everything is fated to happen, but we make the choices. But I think some things are stable coefficients in an otherwise changing…”  
  
“God, please don’t go all whiz-kid on me, Spock and Chekov are enough,” McCoy grumbles as he tries to stop Jim before he goes off on a tangent.   
  
Jim grins as he heads into the room with absolutely no shame as to the fact that he’s wearing nothing but a towel. It’s short enough that it draws all of McCoy’s attention. He tells himself he’s paying attention because Jim is being brazen and forward and  _worth_  noticing, but it’s not exactly a bad body. Half the Academy would agree and the other half would probably love to find out.   
  
“What’s got you so worked up about fate and destiny?” Jim wonders as he yanks his black t-shirt over his head, licking a droplet of water off the corner of his lips.   
  
McCoy shrugs idly, trying not to let a fortune teller who knew him for all of ten minutes get to him. It’s so many years ago and he tells himself that the only reason he’s thinking about this is because it’s Joanna’s birthday and he’s thinking about the J that broke his heart. “No reason, really,” he grumbles and tosses Jim’s pants at him. “Get dressed.”  
  
“So, are you seriously not gonna tell me?”  
  
“It’s…it’s stupid,” McCoy protests with a mild huff. “When I was a kid,” he explains, watching Jim slide into his too-tight pants (he makes a note to measure his waist and get Jim on a better exercise program), clutching his drink tighter. “When I was a kid,” he goes on, calmer than before, “I went to this fair and a fortune teller told me that my soulmate’s name began with the letter J. And Jocelyn clearly broke my heart. The fair’s back in town and I guess I was thinking about that woman and I almost wanted to go shove her purely subjective and faulty fortune-telling in her face.”  
  
“I always knew you were a scientist at heart, Bones,” Jim cheerfully notes. “You and Spock have more in…”  
  
“Don’t finish that sentence.”  
  
“Anyway, it’s just a stupid fortune, like those ones in the papers of old,” Jim says with a wave of his hand. “Go see her, tell her what happened if she’s still there and get your rocks off if you need to.” Jim rubs his towel through his hair and drops it over McCoy’s face as he jumps the couch and sits beside him with a broad grin on his face, pressing a smack of a kiss to his cheek. “Or are you afraid she’s right and Jocelyn was your one-and-only and now you’re screwed.”  
  
McCoy doesn’t dignify that with an answer, which Jim probably takes to assume that he’s right.   
  
He’ll just be damned if he’s going to ignore a dare in plain sight like that. Maybe Mercury is in retrograde and Venus is spinning on its axis, but whatever the solar system is currently doing, the planets come together to help McCoy make a desperately bad idea as he makes a mental note to book transport back to the fair that’s been waiting for him for decades.  
  
*  
  
The great and mysterious Madame Esmeralda is still telling fortunes at state fairs all over the country and there’s something about that piece of information that makes McCoy feel very sad for this woman. McCoy catches up with her in Washington State, chartering a shuttle to take him to the fairgrounds just as the sun is setting in the sky. Like every visit he’s made to the northwest, it’s rainy and foggy, like a permanent depressed drizzle has settled over the land.   
  
He lingers outside the carnival tent for a long while, hands in the pockets of his black peacoat as he waits for the Madame to finish with the fortunes of the two thirteen-year-old girls that had gone inside giggling and popping multicolored pieces of cotton candy past their lips. They finish and whisper their gossip as they toddle past and McCoy thinks that he should just turn around and leave before anything stupid actually happens.   
  
“Leonard McCoy,” the musical tone of a woman’s voice stops him in his path and he turns around to take a look at a woman who he’d known for all of ten minutes during his childhood. She looks short now. Not quite  _old_ , but slightly older than before when she didn’t have a mark on her that time held a claim to. She’s still got regal grace and beauty and as she leads him into the tent, there’s still a heavy smell to the fabrics. “You’ve grown up.”  
  
“You’ve barely changed at all,” he admits, voice gruff as he folds himself down into the small stool, crossing his arms. “I should go. Me being here is a mistake.”  
  
“I don’t believe so,” is her response. “You want an answer and I think maybe you’re old enough to deserve one. You tell a child their future and they start planning for it, changing the course of their path until it’s no longer true. I couldn’t do that to you, not when the entire fate of the universe depended on your future. An already-altered path, I might add. Meddlers, the lot of them,” she sighs. “But now, you’re ready.”  
  
“You’re too late,” McCoy informs her with a shake of his head. “That’s all I came to say. You gave me the hint to my soulmate and you gave me a letter and all that J has done is break my heart twice-over. I lost Jocelyn, I don’t have Joanna. My path is at a pretty convincing cliff’s edge of an end.”  
  
She looks at him with sympathy and reaches across the table to clasp his hand. “You stay right here. Don’t peek under my tablecloths,” she warns as she arranges her skirts and stands, heading out of the tent.   
  
She’s only gone for a moment or two when she returns with company.  
  
“I really don’t believe in this stuff…”  
  
“No, you wouldn’t, but you do have someone in here to support…”  
  
McCoy glances over his shoulder and grimaces. “Jim,” he sighs. “What the hell are you doing following me? It’s a  _fair_  and a fortune-teller, you didn’t think I could handle something like this by myself?”  
  
“I was just waiting for you. And maybe bobbing for apples,” he adds, sheepishly brushing droplets of water from the collar of his blue button-down. “I didn’t know if you were going to get depressed after if she told you that Jocelyn was your one and only and maybe I wanted to know if that’s the case.”  
  
“Well,” Madame Esmeralda remarks as she slides back into her seat. “The both of you can release that breath you’re holding in, because Jocelyn is not your soulmate.”  
  
Jim glances at McCoy and nudges him in the arm, grinning buoyantly as he ruffles his hair. “See, Bones! That’s great news.” He turns to the gypsy, exuberance on his face that won’t quite dissipate. “Now do me. Tell me who I’m meant to spend my future with.”  
  
“I don’t have to tell you, Captain Kirk,” she says gently.   
  
“You kind of do, I really don’t know,” Jim protests. “I had Carol for all of five minutes and then she left my life for her work. I mean, she was pretty much the closest I got to…” he trails off and looks at McCoy for a long moment. McCoy knows that look on his face. That’s the genius’ way of processing something that was once difficult and impossible that has just become clear to him. “ _Oh_ ,” he says. “Oh.” There’s a long pause and McCoy shifts, unsure of what he’s supposed to say to break up the silence. “I get it,” Jim continues, saving McCoy that quandary. “Really? My whole life?” he goes on, a glimmer in his eyes that speaks of boyish excitement.   
  
“I’m lost and I’m pretty sure this was still about me,” McCoy interrupts with a lazy hand in the air as he looks pointedly at the Madame.   
  
“I’ve told you. The love of your life has a name that starts with the letter J,” she replies and dismisses them with a wave of her hand. “I know you’re not an idiot, Leonard McCoy. You’re a genius and have been since the age of five. You know exactly what terrifies you about what you already know, but you won’t let it stop you. Good luck, boys,” she says to them with a nod and a press of a palm to their cheeks. “Don’t let the universe tell you anything is impossible.”  
  
McCoy opens his mouth to speak, but he’s cut off by a singular look from Jim that says that some subjects are best left alone.   
  
The whimsy of the fair seems muted as Leonard McCoy steps away from the tent onto dew-dropped ground and the epiphany hits so hard that it steals the breath away from him and all the stars in the sky seem to drop down and knock sense into him.   
  
 _Oh_ , indeed.  
  
*  
  
 _TEN YEARS LATER_  
  
“Goddamn brat of a…” McCoy complains as he bends down to pick up yet another pair of wayward socks that have found their way onto the floor along with the shirt, the padd, the apple core, and the dozen other things that generally belong in a cupboard instead of on the  _floor_  like a twelve-year-old.   
  
Speak of the devil…  
  
The crunching sound alerts McCoy that he has company. With socks balled up in hand, he waits for the door to slide open before he takes aim, waits, and then fires week-old sweaty smelly socks at Jim Kirk’s waiting chest.  
  
“Hey!” Jim protests. “I was gonna wear those.”  
  
“And offend every last ambassador within a five-foot radius?” McCoy retorts. “Jim, you’d overwhelm Spock with the disgusting smell. They’re laundry, which goes  _in_  the laundry, amazingly.” He leans over to pick up the dirty shirt next, pelting it as Jim tries to make advances forward, barely gaining ground on the sudden battlefield of the bedroom. “I’m serious. You leave anymore crap on the floor and…”  
  
“And what, you’ll divorce me?” Jim asks with a quirk of his lips, smirking at him. “Yeah, no, I’m pretty sure that Madame Esmeralda said you’d be with me your  _whole life_.”  
  
“Don’t pull out those threats,” McCoy retorts, but he’s starting to grin. “You know me and my old divorce lawyer still play tennis.”  
  
“Yeah, say hi for me,” Jim notes happily, gaining the last few feet of ground and pressing a peck of a kiss to the corner of McCoy’s lips. “Are you really that pissed? I mean, it’s socks and a shirt and…okay, so the apple core is kind of gross admittedly, but I totally didn’t do it on purpose.”  
  
McCoy shakes his head and hauls Jim close for a quick kiss. “The rest of my life,” he sighs out the words. “I definitely was late in the line the day they gave out loves of your life.”  
  
He feels Jim’s grin against his lips when he leans in and presses their lips together for a longer kiss, McCoy breathing out a laugh against Jim’s mouth as he closes his eyes and indulges in the sensation of their lips together.  
  
“Bullshit,” Jim breathes out in a whisper.   
  
“Just stop leaving the goddamn apple cores around.”  
  
And the letter J just looks at him with a wicked look on his face as his eyes and lips make promises that McCoy isn’t going to be thinking about apple cores, dirty socks, or discarded shirts in just a moment.


End file.
